


Thirteenth Kirin

by the_original_n_chan



Category: Juuni Kokki | Twelve Kingdoms, X -エックス- | X/1999
Genre: Assorted Other Characters from X, Canonical S/S Feels, Fusion, M/M, Subaru Is a Magical Creature, X Characters in 12K World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 09:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1299958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_original_n_chan/pseuds/the_original_n_chan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the final battle, Subaru wakes up on Mount Hou to find himself transformed. How can the thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan, Dragon of Heaven, and (briefly) Sakurazukamori reconcile his past with his future as the holy beast of Wa? It helps that he's not alone....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirteenth Kirin

**Author's Note:**

> Assume basic spoilers for all of Tokyo Babylon and X. 
> 
> Disclaimer: All rights reserved to the original creators. No copyright infringement is intended.

I.

_Taiho._

_Taiho._

“Taiho.”

Slowly Subaru’s eyelids drifted up to half-mast. A dazzle of light greeted him, a blue field blurring between his lashes—he blinked his eyes open wider and stared. Blue sky, without clouds. The sun, shining.

It had been night. Night, and fire, and the scream of two swords meeting....

“Where...?” he murmured.

He was lying on his back. He could feel grass underneath his fingers. The sun was warm on his face and hands, the air sweet-smelling and so perfectly clear that everything seemed unreal, as if it were a dream. Or an illusion.

“He’s awake!”

“Oh! He has such strange _eyes_.”

The voices were like wind chimes, a far-off music. He wondered if he should try to find some meaning in them.

“Taiho.” Closer, this one, and more emphatic. He shifted his gaze, and with a little start he realized that there was a half-circle of women hovering about him, dressed in robes as blue as the sky. The one at the center, the one who seemed to have just spoken, and to be their leader, wore her hair in elaborate twin loops. She bowed, the others following her lead like autumn grasses bending before the wind; as she straightened, she smiled at him, her expression gravely anxious yet lit with a quiet, almost tremulous joy. “Welcome to Mount Hou.”

“I’m...where?”

Koukai. Houro Palace. The names meant nothing. He jerked upright suddenly, the women gasping in alarm as he moved. The world was a whirl of fractured, too-quick glimpses, a green meadow starred with flowers, walls of grey rock spires, the shimmer of a nearby pool. As he rocked forward, white hair spilled past his shoulder.

White....

He caught at the long, pale strands, stared at them. Without question, it was his hair. He could feel the faint catch and tug. Stunned, he opened his hand, and a delicate breeze pulled at those strands, sent them sliding through his fingers like water, like light.

Impossible.

A dream? He looked around at the arc of women, their troubled faces and nervous hands. They appeared real enough, true individuals and not someone’s imaginings, yet nothing in this place felt like reality. Past the women, a flicker of brightness drew his gaze—he pushed himself to his feet and walked numbly through their line as they parted before him like clouds, a murmur and rustle like rain. At the edge of the pool he dropped to his knees and leaned out over the bank. That improbable hair tumbled forward again, long enough that the very tips of it brushed the water, and framed by it there was his face after all, his eyes, the one green, the other dark brown still, still.... He cupped his hand over that eye, fingers parted enough that he could still see it, the reassurance that even here, where nothing else made sense, that central truth of his life remained.

“How did I get here?” he asked at last, after a long silence.

“Taiho, I know that this must be very strange for you.” That word again—a title? He turned to look at the woman; she met his gaze with what seemed like genuine concern. “I promise, we’ll explain everything as best we can, but—oh!” She glanced to one side, and her eyes widened. “So _there_ she is....”

“ _SUBARUUUUU!_ ” He froze at the sound of that voice, so agonizingly familiar, so utterly unlooked-for. Then a solid weight hit his back—pounced on him, sending the air whuffing out of his lungs. A pair of arms wrapped around him from behind and hugged him with indignant strength. “ _Mou_ , you dork! What _took_ you so long?”

“Hokuto....” He closed his eyes against the pain that strangled his voice, the loss that ripped at him all over again, the frenzied soaring hope that he scarcely dared imagine might be possible. Yet there was no mistaking this feeling, this aura—his own twin sister, closer to him than his own heart, even after so terribly long. Enfolded in her presence, he caught his breath, a low half-sob, and tilted his head to rest against hers, a prickle of tears gathering rapidly behind his closed lids, his hand shifting to settle on her arm.

Wait.

Why was Hokuto... _furry_?

His eyes snapped open again. For a second he stared straight ahead, his mind blank with shock; then, with incremental slowness, he turned his head back toward the pool’s reflective surface.

He wasn’t sure that he really wanted to look.

 

II.

The tree’s branches arced high above him, thrusting toward the sky before crooking down once more, massive boughs narrowing into zigzagging twiggy fingers that seemed to grope with mindless yearning toward the earth. Leafless but not lifeless—lying back along one great root, Subaru could feel a slow, ceaseless coursing of energy, a current of verdant force pulsing deep beneath the bark. In its age and size, the mute weight of its presence, the breath of soul-nature that clung to it, it reminded him, inevitably, of another tree.

_Shashinboku._ From this, he had been told, there arose...beings who were like him.

Even as an onmyouji, accustomed to strange and occult things, he could scarcely credit it.

Moodily he lifted a lock of white hair and held it up before his eyes, turning it, watching the strands fan apart. _Kirin._ He was having trouble fathoming that, as well. He felt no different—still raw, still crushed and broken. Surely to awaken in another world as a heavenly beast meant some kind of transfiguration. But he was exactly as he’d been—

Shadow blocked sun, a dark shape looming nearer than the tree’s limbs, as Hokuto popped into view directly above him. “Su-ba-ru! Are you still brooding?”

Subaru started. With an effort, he managed not to jerk upright, which would probably have ended with him and Hokuto bashing foreheads. Hokuto’s green eyes blinked at him, her face upside down from his point of view as she leaned forward over him. His jaw tightening, Subaru glanced away, his gaze flinching from hers.

Those eyes, which no longer matched his own....

A sudden thrumming drone—a flurry of air licked at his hair, his clothes, ran over his skin like a shiver in a field of grass. Even aching as he was, he couldn’t help but watch her as she took to flight. Black, silky fur flashing iridescent in the sun, emerald quetzal tail, delicate antennae curving backward as she swooped above him—mid-air, she spun en pointe on one cat-pawed foot, her narrow, pointed wings a blur behind her as she faced him once more. She wore a trailing length of shimmering violet fabric wound about herself—to the bemusement of the attendants, the nyosen, who seemed to find this rather out of the ordinary, but Hokuto wouldn’t be Hokuto without some gesture toward fashion. She hardly needed it for modesty’s sake—the fur covered all but hands, face, and throat, making her appear to be wearing a full-body leotard with a curving sweetheart neckline.

“Subaru! I know it’s too much to expect you to go frolicking among the lilies, but seriously! You’ve been lying there like a tired old dustrag for at least an hour now. You’re a kirin! Couldn’t you be just a _little_ bit sparkly?”

Sharply Subaru sat up; drawing one leg in, he wrapped both arms around it and hugged it protectively to his chest. Turning his head, he pressed his cheek against his raised knee. Pale hair tumbled down across his face. As he tightened his grip still further, he felt the strain along his shoulders like a band stretching toward breaking, echoing the tensions of anguish and dread that he struggled to contain.

He could never have mustered a clever retort to his sister’s teasing, even then. Now, even the old ingenuousness was beyond him. The buzz of her hummingbird wings stopped, and the unexpected silence struck him through with panic, as though she might have vanished, even though he could still sense her presence. “It’s wrong,” he blurted, his voice hoarse and strangled. “This is a mistake. A dream.”

“Which is it?” There was laughter in her low words. But at least she hadn’t left him. Desperately, he shook his head.

“I can’t. You don’t understand. I can’t be a kirin.” He felt her move nearer, cat’s paws silent on the tree’s root, and gentle fingers brushed through his hair, lifting it away from his face. He recoiled, snatching his hand up to cover his right eye. “ _Don’t!_ ”

A moment’s hesitation, and then those fingers returned. They touched the back of his hand, cupped against it. He couldn’t feel the slender claws. Only that cool, tender pressure, and all he wanted—all that he had wanted, it seemed, for too many long years—was to incline his head against it, to rest like that in perfect stillness, in a timeless peace.

“The world that we came from is cruel,” she murmured at last. “Maybe because it’s farther away from Heaven. I always thought that you were too pure to belong there. I was afraid that you wouldn’t be able to survive.”

_But that world took you instead._ “I’m not that Subaru,” he whispered. “You don’t know who I’ve become.”

“So have you killed anyone?” Startled, he glanced up at her, met a frank regard that held him, quiet challenge without accusation. “I’m not asking what you _would_ have done,” she clarified, adding more softly, “I think no one can ever really know for sure until they come face to face with the decision.”

_Seishirou-san_ —but that had been the spell. Hokuto’s spell. And he had been Sakurazukamori for such a short time, not long enough to be required to fulfill the role’s darker functions.

His hand had slackened beneath hers, his fingers parting a little. As she gazed down at him, a faint smile touched her lips.

“Do _you_ know who you are, Subaru? Who you really are? Before you understood anything about the Sumeragi clan, before Grandmother got her hands on you? Before _him?_ ” Hokuto’s other hand hesitated briefly over her heart, then reached out to settle above his. He found himself aware of his pulse, a little fast, a little tremulous. Acting without thought, he reached up in turn, put both arms around her. He pulled her down against himself, into his lap, hiding his face against her shoulder as she enfolded him in a fierce, sweet embrace of arms and wings. She smelled of warmth. Of home.

_Two hearts beating close together. Never to be parted._

“Hokuto....”

It was enough for him—enough that when her grasp loosened at last, releasing him, he was somehow content.

“Now!” she declared, energetic and abrupt, and familiar though that change of mood was, he still jumped at it a little. “Perk up, Subaru! No more moping! After all, you’ve got more important things to be doing!” He blinked at her, wondering what she knew that he didn’t. They stared at each other for a few moments. “Well?” she demanded at last.

“Um....”

“ _Kirin transformation sequence!_ ” Hokuto leaped up to strike a dramatic midair pose. “Come on, Subaru! Let’s see that flowing mane rippling in the breeze!”

And oh, even the heat in his face was welcome, was familiar. He hadn’t blushed like this in.... He ducked his head, and his hand stole up, clutched nervously at the front of his robe. “Hokuto, I don’t know how—”

“Yes, you do! _You do._ ” He glanced up again as she backwinged away, opening the gap between them a little more, her blurring wings making the air tremble with sound, like the crooning of summer cicadas, of contentedly dreaming bees. She smiled at him, holding out her hand. “Let’s go!”

He rose, unloosed his sash, scarcely thinking of what he was doing, aware only of the lift, the leap of his heart following her as she flashed upward suddenly, racing for the sky, and as the cloth fell away, he stepped out of it, and out of himself—

The sparkling, flower-strewn wind bore him up as he ran after her, four-legged and free—as he ran toward that endless, joyful blue and the ringing sound of her laughter.

 

III.

“‘Waki’—the kirin for Wa. It’s cute, isn’t it? It sounds like you’re the cute mascot of something or other!”

“Hokuto—”

“Hssh! We’re hunting youma!”

Subaru sighed. They were hardly _stalking_ anything, more like strolling through the lovely parklike woodland, and Hokuto had been making enough noise for a crowd all by herself, but he didn’t really mind her gleeful hypocrisy. Any moment spent with her was precious. The only shadow on the day was a trace of guilt—this time felt stolen, taken away from the duty he ought to be fulfilling. But he couldn’t take up that duty until he’d bound shirei to serve and fight for him, and although he’d been trying for weeks now, for some reason he was proving utterly unable to catch and hold even one. Even the weakest slipped through his grasp, ignoring his challenges and simply vanishing into the grass or shrubbery or sky. It was strange and frustrating, especially for someone who’d been dealing with spirits almost from the time he could walk. 

Maybe it was that very experience as a human spirit worker that was getting in the way of his kirin abilities. Maybe there was some different application of will that was required.

Or maybe some part of him didn’t want his time in this place to end....

Nevertheless, it was going to have to end someday. And he was truly embarrassed to be so backward at this. Today he’d asked his mentor simply to drop him off in the forest, ashamed to make the other kirin dog his steps yet again and patiently run him through the binding spell over and over, to no avail.

“Ugh! Smells damp. And cold.” Distracted from his brooding, Subaru lifted his gaze and looked around. They had come to the edge of a steep, deeply shaded ravine, its slopes a jumble of boulders embraced by twisting tree roots. Crossing branches and a sharp bend in the cleft hid its bottom, but a faint trail seemed to lead downward, through the rocks. “Subaru! Let’s try up there.” Hokuto pointed away, off to their right. “I think I see a lilac meadow!”

“Wait.” Something was tugging at him, familiar but indefinable, like the chill tingle of an unmanifest ghost. He stared into the ravine, brows drawn in concentration, but the subtle trace faded to near imperceptibility as he reached after it, as if in teasing retreat.

Something....

“Down there? Noooo!” As Subaru started for the path, Hokuto followed up her melodramatic wail with an equally over-the-top sigh. “You know there’s probably giant spirit worms down there, right?” she called after him. “And newts and things!”

Subaru concentrated on his footing instead of her complaints. The trail sloped sharply despite its wandering cutbacks, and he frequently had to scramble over rocks, roots, and even fallen trees. Past the turn, the sides of the ravine drew closer together, and the dim shade increased. He could smell and feel the dampness that Hokuto had mentioned, but he didn’t mind it. It was like earth in the late fall or very early spring, caught in abeyance before the full change of season, like stones in winter, shrouded by ice and snow. He could almost taste it, cool on his tongue, at the back of his throat.

Hokuto was silent behind him; the walls were too close for her to fly. Subaru eased around another turn, barely more than the breadth of his shoulders, and stopped short. Before him the ravine widened again, and a lip of stone stretched out into dark, still water. Not stagnant, though—he realized that the walls to either side of the cleft’s opening were wet, that they held dozens of tiny springs, the water seeping through cracks in the rock to trickle silently down into the pool, refreshing it so subtly that he couldn’t see the least stirring of currents. And across the pool....

A man in a black kimono, sitting on a broken chunk of rock, one leg drawn up casually, his hair falling forward over his face.

_I know...._

The man lifted his head, turning toward Subaru, and in the ravine’s deep shadow his eyes gleamed: two white voids above an all-too-familiar smile.

_Oh. Oh. Oh._

_Him._

“Subaru-kun.” The voice, the voice was the same too, and every muscle in Subaru’s body was trembling, every nerve cell splintering helplessly—not the long anger, not the betrayal, no, just fear, a fear so pure and stark that it transcended any words that might define it, that might limit it to something sane and rational.

“So good to ‘see’ you.” That laughter was in his voice, irony in invisible movement, like the dark water. His blank gaze fixed at some intermediate distance, he cocked his head. “The two of you.”

Hokuto’s hand closed onto the sleeve of Subaru’s robe. “ _Ah_ ,” she breathed, a thin, whispered cry that sounded as fragile and terrified as he felt. Terrified for _him_.

The man’s smile widened. “I’ve been waiting.” And as he rose to his feet, the blackness of his clothing bled into the air around him, slow and then all-at-once swift, obscuring him in a shadow wind, a swelling whirl of pitch-dark night silvered with stars.

“ _RUN!_ ” The scream tore itself out of Subaru as he spun away, thrusting Hokuto before him, as they scrabbled up the twisting path, almost thrown forward on their faces by the sudden, raging gale. Small and not-so-small stones fell around them; he could hear roots groan, trees crack, the walls of the ravine itself shattering in their wake, a great, crashing slide and roar. The instant the sides opened wide enough, Hokuto took to desperate flight—Subaru snagged the sleeve of his robe on a jagged spar of deadwood and left the half-ripped garment there, galloping upward on the whipping wind, his own mane almost blinding him. The forest was breaking, falling to pieces around him, and he jinked under toppling trunks, over and around them, slaloming wildly through the destruction. Suddenly he was clear, with only air around him and above him just a featureless bleak sky, dark as spirit vision, as the inside of a maboroshi. He soared in a high arc, looking back for the first time as out of the great ragged hole that had been the ravine there arose—

A dragon. 

Vast black length that seemed never to end, scales and claws, silver horns and wild gilt-frosted mane, and above the fanged and grinning jaws the same white, sightless eyes.

_Seishirou-san...is a youma in this world?_

Then he started, flung himself aside as the dragon struck at him, heart-stoppingly fast for something so enormous. He dove, and the dragon coiled about to follow, tracking him effortlessly. And as he dodged under its body and it rolled, winding and unwinding itself, too clever and graceful to tangle itself up, the mad thought flashed across his mind—

_A youma._

_The spell._

_But...._

_How do you hold the gaze of something with no eyes?_

Teeth clashed shut almost on his long tail—far too close, and he bolted straight upward, trying to get clear, seeking distance enough to let him think, just for a moment. But the angle was too steep, he lost speed, and whatever sense it was that let the dragon chase him so unerringly, it was gaining on him once more. It ignored his desperate feint, opened its jaws, and—

Hokuto dove across the dragon’s path in a shrilling of wings, her claws raking the sensitive pad of its nose. It recoiled, and then, as Hokuto cut into a tight arc to come around again, it turned toward her and roared, a deafening hurricane blast. The winds tossed her, sent her slight form tumbling helplessly toward the ground, and the dragon bent swiftly in pursuit.

“ _HOKUTO!_ ” There was no time for thinking at all. There was only the dive, the fall, the shocking impact of his body against the dragon’s neck. Human, he tangled his hands in the blowing mane before he could be thrown off. Arms flung wide, holding tight to the dragon, he pressed his forehead to its neck, felt its thunderous pulse beating against his chest.

“ _Rin!_ ” he cried. “ _Byou! Tou! Sha! Kai! Jin! Retsu! Zen! Gyou!_ ”

The world went still. If the wind blew past him now, he couldn’t feel it. There was just the two of them, suspended in time, in between the steps of a dance that had turned for years around a common center, a moment, a meeting, never bringing them together, but never, truly, letting them drift apart.

_I’ve been waiting_ , Seishirou had said.

_Ah._

Eternity stretched out between each breath, each thought, slender and taut as a wire, fathomless and still as a dark mirror, as a black pool beneath the trees. And into that listening, waiting hush, Subaru placed the words of his incantation, one by one. 

“ _Shinchoku meichoku...tensei chisei...jinkun seikun._ ” They fell like petals, one upon the next.

“ _Fuo fudaku...._ ”

He felt dizzy—recognized the sudden smell of blood, metallic and cloying. Had he cut himself on the dragon’s scales? No...the backs of his hands stung, a familiar pain, and he could feel the thin, swift-trickling flow running down his wrists. He fought to hold onto consciousness as his stomach lurched and his spirit recoiled violently, as the world around him began to dim.

“ _Kimi koubuku...onmyou wagou_.” Just a little farther. “ _Kyukyu...nyo ritsurei...._ ”

He closed his eyes on the gathering darkness, turned his cheek against the dragon’s mane. “Seishirou-san.”

_Be my shirei._

_Be mine._

 

He was being held, and for a few drowsy moments, he felt adrift in time. Could he have been dreaming, and could it be those days again? The feel of that strong arm around his shoulders....

He opened his eyes, turned his head to look up into Seishirou’s face. Seishirou’s eyes were half-lidded, moon pale; the smile that quirked his mouth was not the false cheer or the feigned romance of old but the real one, only slightly softened, a little less dangerous. “Subaru-kun,” he murmured. His voice was a purr; Subaru felt its vibration, felt the rise and fall of his breath. “Did you have a nice rest?”

“Seishirou-san....” Subaru reached up—his hand cleansed of blood, the skin unmarked once more—and touched the side of that dear, cruel, kind face. His fingers rested against Seishirou’s temple; he looked at the ruined eyes, and his chest tightened with sudden grief.

“Ah. Do you still worry about me the way you used to?” Seishirou sounded amused. “Don’t. ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye.’ So, it’s all right. I read that in a book once,” he added thoughtfully. Bending, he pressed his lips to Subaru’s hair, and said, half muffled against the long strands. “It makes more sense to me now.”  
Subaru closed his eyes, transfixed by a joy so pure it was almost painful, yet at the same time it was a release, like locked and frozen muscles learning to stretch again after years of paralysis. If he hadn’t been held in Seishirou’s arms, he could have soared.

“OHOHOHOHO!” His eyes jerked open again at the sound of his sister’s laughter. He looked over and saw her sitting perched on a fallen tree trunk. “Well, Subaru, I always said that the two of you made a good picture together.” Grinning, she held up her hands, making a frame with her fingers. “But this one is _definitely_ the best!”  
And that was when Subaru realized that he and Seishirou were—

Naked.

“ _Waaaugh!_ ”

And as Hokuto and Seishirou’s laughter echoed across the remains of the forest, Subaru shifted into his kirin shape, shedding flowers all over Seishirou, and scrambled to his feet with a horrified snort. Their laughter redoubled, and he hung his head low so that his mane fell over his face, wondering if magical beasts could blush. But if he’d been human at that instant, there would have been a smile on his face too, fleeting and private.

For the two people he loved best in the world.

In any world.

 

IV.

Suoh looked up as Akira entered the office, and he accepted the offered cup of tea with a nod and a faint smile. The ritual of so many years gave him comfort, let the knot of tense concentration loosen slightly. In the darkness outside the tall windows, the rain continued to drum down, relentless and steady. The campus systems controlled the worst of the atmospheric anomalies, but it seemed as though they were still in for some heavy weather.

“Is it going all right?” Akira asked, and Suoh glanced back at his computer monitors. Security and infrastructure reports filled a number of windows.

“Not bad. The previous chairman prepared everything well.” It could be said that the Dragons of Heaven had won—although the victory was marginal and sadly pyrrhic—but the consequences of that battle continued to unfold. Aside from the large swaths of destruction in Tokyo itself, the climate around the world had been fluctuating wildly over the last couple of months: high seas, intense storms, brutal droughts and wildfires. It was as if the natural world was protesting the fall of its champions. Or perhaps beginning its death throes from too many years of human abuse.

The CLAMP Campus remained an oasis, and its people were working with all their technical skill and brilliance to come up with ways to mitigate the effects—or, if nothing else sufficed, to prepare to use the technologies that sustained the campus itself to create other habitats where human beings could survive whatever might befall. To protect _everyone_ , though—it was an unimaginably massive task.

On the one hand, Suoh was glad that his own responsibilities were so much smaller. On the other, he wished he could take more of the burden from the one who was overseeing the entire thing.

His earpiece beeped, distracting him, and he raised his hand to take the call. “Yes.”

“Sir, there’s someone at the front door. He says he wants to see the chairman.”

Suoh frowned. Who would just turn up on the mansion’s front step like that? And in the middle of the night? He brought up a video feed on one screen and stared at the unannounced visitor. The person wore a brown, hooded cloak, an oddity that only increased Suoh’s suspicion. Then the shrouded head turned, lifted, and that person looked up, directly into the camera.

_Him?_

“I’ll take care of it,” Suoh said, and he ended the call, already striding toward the door. Akira trailed him, matching his brisk pace, knowing his mood from long familiarity and needing no explanation that something out of the ordinary was up. They hastened down the stairs to the ground floor’s main entrance hall; Suoh nodded to Akira, who moved directly to the front door and pulled it open, while Suoh hung back in readiness. The man outside met Akira’s stare calmly, the light from the hall falling over his face, and Akira gasped.

“Sumeragi-san?”

There had been only hints, glimpses, in the days after he had last left the mansion, withdrawing from the Dragons of Heaven in the wake of the Sakurazukamori’s death. There was a suggestion that he had been involved in the battle even after that, but the reports were confused; their best intelligence had listed him as missing, possibly dead.

Why was he standing on the front steps of the Imonoyama mansion well after midnight?

And when had his eye been restored? 

But...it was different now.

“Come in!” Akira said, and as the Sumeragi stepped forward, Suoh tensed.

“Wait—!

Sumeragi Subaru crossed the threshold, and the red-tasseled mirrors hanging to either side of the doorway cracked, the glass falling in splinters. Suoh’s shuriken were in his hands as Akira leaped back instinctively; then they were in flight, to pin, not to kill—

A shadow appeared between Suoh and his target, a tall man extending his arm before Subaru, black trenchcoat flaring about him. Dark ofuda fanned out in his hand, and the shuriken glanced aside, deflected into the floor. The man grinned, sunglasses glinting, as Suoh drew more blades; Akira started forward, then jerked to a halt at a hand on his arm. “Ha! I wouldn’t do that,” trilled a sing-song voice, and Suoh was startled to see a teenaged girl appear behind Akira as if from nowhere, smiling brilliantly. She had...wings?

“Enough,” Subaru said. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder and gently moved him aside; the man yielded gracefully, yet with a coiled readiness that didn’t put Suoh at ease in the slightest. Subaru stepped forward and met Suoh’s gaze with his odd eyes, his manner formal, his face grave as it had always been, although Suoh thought something indefinable had changed about it. “Takamura-san, I’m sorry for the intrusion.” His eyes flickered to the wall for a moment, then returned to Suoh. “Forgive me for the wards. I’ll replace them.”

“What are you doing here?” With an effort, Suoh kept his voice to something just shy of a snarl. He split his attention enough to scan the other man, the stranger, trying to get a better assessment of him. “And who is—”

“It may be kind of late for a social call, but time played some tricks on us on the way here.” The girl’s wings blurred into motion; she rose above the floor, hovered, and then slid sideways out from behind Akira as he gaped at her, dumbfounded. She bore a remarkable resemblance to Subaru, only younger, and with an impish grin that he could never imagine the head of the Sumeragi clan wearing. She clasped her hands behind her back, and her smirk gentled into something that was knowing and wise as well as mischievous. “Anyway, this is really about work. Isn’t it, Subaru?”

“Work—?” Suoh began, but was interrupted by a quiet step behind him, a familiar presence, the sound of a voice.

“What’s going on, Suoh?” Nokoru stood on the steps, just above the landing. He’d paused for a moment, and now moved forward, turning the corner to descend toward the ground floor. He’d changed into a deep red robe belted closed over silk pajamas, but Suoh could tell from the bright alertness of his eyes and his unmussed hair that he hadn’t been asleep.

A quiet but sharply caught breath jerked his attention back to their visitors. Subaru was staring at Nokoru, his eyes wide, looking strangely bewildered. Then his gaze softened with what might have been understanding, or possibly surrender. “Ah,” Subaru murmured. There was something like wonder in his voice, a lingering trace of surprise. “It’s you.”

“Subaru-san?” Nokoru stopped a step above the floor, his puzzlement evident in his face. Still staring at Nokoru, Subaru put back the hood, unwrapped the cloak from around himself, and the man in black stepped forward to take it before it hit the ground, draping it over his arm as smoothly as if he were a trained valet. Suoh started and knew that the others shared his surprise at the sight of Subaru’s hair, far longer than a mere handful of months could account for. Moving with the air of a person in a dream, Subaru walked forward past Suoh— _danger_ , Suoh thought, but it was only a thought, with none of the force of instinct, for as Subaru brushed by him it was like a cloud of peace, of purity, and Suoh suddenly knew bone deep, heart deep, that there was no threat whatsoever to Nokoru. 

Subaru stopped before the stairs and gazed up at Nokoru. “Imonoyama-san. You already know what your duty is, don’t you?”

Nokoru’s eyes widened. Then he nodded wordlessly, and Subaru sighed. With fluid grace the Sumeragi sank down onto his knees, then bent lower, bringing his head close the floor, and as he bowed his dark hair shimmered pale, falling forward about his face in spilling rivers of improbably white silk.

“Then I acknowledge you as the ruler of this kingdom in heaven’s sight,” Subaru said, the words clear, distinct, and formal. “I will never abandon you. I will never disobey your royal command. I pledge my loyalty to you. This I vow.”

“I accept,” Nokoru said with calm gravity, but it was all too quick, too quick for Suoh to ask questions or even to realize what had happened until the shock hit: _this person, pledging themselves to his special One—_

“It’s not the same thing, Suoh.” Startled, Suoh glanced up and saw the glint in his chairman’s blue eyes, acknowledgment, understanding, a glimmer of never unkind amusement. Suoh flushed in spite of himself. 

The winged girl cheered suddenly, fluttering up into the air. “Yay, you found him! And he’s a _cute_ one, too!” She sidled around Akira, the wind of her buzzing wings blowing his hair, and nudged up against the man in sunglasses, her expression turning sly, her antennae twitching. “Seiii-chan, aren’t you going to be jealous?”

“Impossible,” the man said, smiling toothily in a way that made Suoh distinctly uncomfortable. “I know that Subaru’s heart belongs to me.”

“So,” Nokoru said, as Subaru rose to his feet once more, his hair darkening back to its normal color, “the powers of Heaven haven’t actually left us to ourselves. I was wondering, after the final battle ended.”

“How did it end?” Subaru asked, and when Nokoru glanced at him in surprise, he added, “I was...elsewhere.” He faltered for a moment, and then went on, dread and a suppressed grief softening his voice. “Kamui...which Kamui fell?”

“You don’t know?” Nokoru blinked at the Sumeragi. Then an all-too-typical resolve took over his face as he made an abrupt decision. “Oh! We should definitely show you, then. Everyone, let’s go—”

“ _Rijichou._ ” And as Suoh was rewarded by a look of bewildered distraction from his chairman, he folded his arms and snorted, long-suffering annoyance mingling with just a hint of smugness. “Your _clothes_.”

 

V.

In the cavernous space beneath the campus fountain, where the Shinken of the Kamui of Heaven had once been kept, light glimmered on a glasslike surface. Not actual glass, though it was just as transparent, not ice or clear quartz or any other material substance. It was as though time and space themselves had frozen into crystal, capturing what they had held in an unbreachable solidity.

Subaru stepped forward to rest his hand against that surface, and Suoh tensed, fearful that he might somehow disturb the spell—but then Subaru was an expert in this, and if he did disturb it, Suoh thought, it would be because it needed disturbing. But nothing changed. The two figures within remained locked in their immutable poses, a tableau of an instant’s violent motion, the two great swords bridging the space between them, their lethal strikes unblocked, nearly at completion.

And flawless though the crystal’s clarity was, there ran through it the finest veils of imperfections, threads that flashed silvery when their delicate traceries caught the light. They looked like wispy plumes drifting, like angel feathers. Like the tracks of wind-caught tears.

“Ah,” Subaru said, removing his hand at last. He stepped back down from the dais. “So the battle is not yet won or lost.”

“No,” Nokoru agreed. “We don’t know, but we think—that is, I think—that one of them, or perhaps both, ultimately couldn’t bear to kill the other one. So in the very last moment, somehow....” He closed his cupped hands together, and Subaru nodded. “If we were to free them—if we were even able to find a way—we might not be able to save them. And if they both survived, what then? Would the final battle start all over again? As it is, we can call it a victory for our side, since at least the human world hasn’t been destroyed yet.” Nokoru regarded the frozen scene, reliving the questions all over, Suoh knew. Then he sighed. “They’re safe there, in a way. And it gives us a chance, for a while, to see what ordinary human beings can do to fix things.” He shrugged in mingled regret and resignation. “Maybe someday....”

“I understand,” Subaru said, and Nokoru looked at him suddenly, attention sharpening into determination behind his still-calm exterior.

“Subaru-san, I have a favor to ask.” Subaru returned Nokoru’s gaze, quizzical but reserved. “I know I just said that this is a time for human beings, and I absolutely believe in our best capabilities—I always have. But all the same, it’s a daunting prospect. Maybe even more so, now.” Nokoru gave a short, breathless laugh and shook his head. “Subaru-san, if I’m your choice, then please give me hope.” And he smiled at Subaru, but there was a profound seriousness behind that expression. “May I see Heaven’s favor?”

Subaru studied him silently, then nodded again. He stepped back, began unbuttoning his shirt, and Suoh just had time for a brief flash of _did he misunderstand Rijichou_ and then a panicked _is this some euphemism that I don’t know about_ before black cloth curtained in between them.

“Sorry!” said the man in sunglasses (Seishirou, and was it really possible that he could be _that_ Seishirou?), smiling blithely as he held his trenchcoat out in front of Subaru, concealing him from everyone else. “No peeking allowed.”

“Seishirou-san,” Subaru muttered, barely audible over the rustling of fabric, “as if I have any modesty left after you and Hokuto—” The last sounds of clothes falling, and then a startling, sourceless wind rushing all about them, to Suoh’s surprise and alarm, and then the _light_ —pure brilliance spilling through all the shadows of the room, subtler but more beautiful than the floodlights picking out the dais and what it held, ethereal, indescribable, with golden glints swirling through it, everywhere, like fireflies. As that glow dimmed but didn’t fade away entirely, Seishirou drew his coat aside with something of a showman’s air, and Suoh and Akira both just stared. A four-legged... _beast_ did not do it justice, nor _creature_ , and certainly not _animal_ , not with Subaru’s sober, calm intelligence in those still-mismatched eyes. Deerlike but not, horselike but not, all white from nose tip to the end of the long, flowing tail, except for the cloven hooves and single golden horn. Suoh felt a chill at that preternatural beauty, that strangeness: awe and wonder, incredulous amazement, a tremor of unexpected humility.

_Not of this world, at all._

“Ah,” Nokoru breathed. He reached out as if in a dream, touched the branching horn, and Subaru dipped his head patiently to permit it. “Thank you, Subaru-san. I— Thank you.” He withdrew his hand. “I’ll try to live up to your faith in me.”

“ _Not faith_.” Subaru’s voice was disquietingly the same, yet somehow off, and Suoh realized with a jolt that he wasn’t speaking aloud. His voice was an inner resonance, felt within the chest as much as in the ears. “ _Revelation. All I can do is say that you’re the one Heaven has chosen. After that, it’s up to you_.” He shook his mane and clacked one hoof against the floor, startlingly loud in that echoing space. “ _But I know you, Imonoyama-san. And I think Heaven has chosen well. You can call that faith, if you like_.”

“I’m honored.” Nokoru half bowed, his palm to his heart, then straightened and flashed them all his more-accustomed smile, the sun-dazzling one that promised grand ideas, adventures (if sometimes terrifying ones), the boundless idealism that would never falter, never fail. “Suoh, Akira—let’s do our best for Subaru-san. And for the sake of all the human world!” 

And as Akira and Hokuto cheered, and Seishirou, smirking, draped his coat over the back of kirin-Subaru, Suoh thought, too, that Heaven had chosen well.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually started this fic in 2005, wrote the first section and part of the second, and then laid it aside when I went into my long fanfic hiatus. I only picked it up again at the end of 2013. Eight years later, and I still remembered exactly what I was doing with it (although section V was a new addition). I'm kind of amazed. ^_^


End file.
